What creative cultural venues do you want in our City?
Parramatta is a rapidly developing City, with the population set to double over the next 20 years. Council recognises that as our city grows and develops, it must become more than a place to work, eat, shop and sleep; it must also be interesting, appealing and imaginative for both residents and visitors.
Parramatta’s cultural identities are rich and unique, and we want to ensure these strengths shape the way our City grows and transforms. When we look at cities around the world, it is cultural infrastructure and the activities in and around it that help make a city desirable, attractive and interesting to explore and just “be” in. A city with a good network of cultural venues is a liveable city – and shows that it puts people, ideas and creativity at its core.
The City of Parramatta Council is currently in the early stages of developing a Cultural Infrastructure Strategy. The feedback we receive from community members throughout this process will help Council better understand what creative cultural venues and experiences to prioritise throughout the Parramatta CBD and our suburbs.
Stage One – Community Consultation
Stage one consultation ran from Monday 1 June to Tuesday 23 June 2020. We had a very strong response, with over 200 online surveys completed during this time. Thank you to all those that contributed!
We learnt a lot about how you currently engage with, as well as how you would like to engage in the future with creative cultural venues and experiences throughout Parramatta. It was clear that there is a strong desire for more creative cultural experiences closer to home as many of you told us that you currently have to leave Parramatta to find these experiences.
To find out more about we heard, please click on the image below.
There will be further consultation and opportunities for the community to have a say on the Draft Cultural Infrastructure Strategy. Please see the timeline for more details.
Frequently Asked Questions
Cultural infrastructure refers to ‘hard’ or physical infrastructure and generally covers arts, cultural and creative venues, as well as businesses and peak bodies, broadly categorised as follows:
1. Community spaces for participation and/or artmaking:
These are spaces that support individual or collective use. For example: makerspaces in libraries, community gardens, First Nations-led Keeping Places and multipurpose community centres that offer arts workshop spaces, or support creative hobby groups and arts organisations
2. Creative practice and development spaces:
These are spaces that support art form development and professional creative practice. For example: rehearsal rooms, writers rooms, artist studios, studio and workshop spaces, relevant education providers (including art, theatre, dance, music and film schools), co-working spaces, not-for-profit artist-run centres or galleries, digital media arts production (film, video, music, gaming), not-for-profit arts organisations and peak bodies, First Nations artist-led initiatives and cultural venues.
3. Performance and exhibition spaces:
These spaces are characterised by cultural venues and infrastructure for audiences or spectatorship. For example: major performing arts venues, live music venues (like, hotels, bars, cafes and clubs), museums, arts galleries, art centres, heritage and discovery centres, comedy clubs, arena entertainment venues, drama and dance theatres
4. Commercial and enterprise spaces:
These spaces belong to creative businesses (e.g. advertising, architectural, fashion design, photographic services). For example: artists, creative manufacturing (like glass, jewellery, ceramics), creative publishing, creative digital media, music recording studios, film and video production, post production and distribution, cinemas, radio, television, web broadcasting, creative retailing (commercial art gallery, art or craft supplies retailing, music instruments retail, book and record stores, antique goods, performing arts companies)
5. Festival, event and public spaces:
These are spaces for temporary, unplanned or ‘special event’ cultural use in the public domain. For example, heritage assets including adaptive reuse, parks, gardens, halls, market spaces, privately owned public spaces, public art, pop-ups, and ‘unusual’ spaces like rooftops, backyards, cafes
No, while there are particular cultural venues which are more likely to be located in the Parramatta CBD (for example, major performing arts venues that show international work and are likely to attract visitors as well as residents), the strategy will apply to suburbs across the Parramatta Local Government Area. As such, we are interested in hearing the views of all people including those that have a view on the cultural infrastructure required across Parramatta’s suburbs.
We anticipate that the cultural infrastructure in neighbourhoods and suburbs will be quite different from the CBD, and reflect the particular character and interests of those communities. For example, for communities with a particularly strong interest in music, cultural venues such as music rehearsal rooms or recording studios might be integrated into multipurpose community centres, and the local café might open Saturday nights to host live music performances.
Council will be closely considering all community feedback and will use this to develop a draft cultural infrastructure strategy. This draft strategy will then be put on public exhibition for a period of four weeks. The whole process is anticipated to be completed by late 2021 and therefore the strategy should come into effect in by the end of 2021 (TBC).
